On paper, June Millington is an unlikely rock'n'roll pioneer. The singer, guitarist, and educator who co-founded Fanny, the first all-female rock band to release an album on a major label, Millington was a shy biracial girl from a religiously conservative culture when she and her family moved from the Philippines to northern California in 1961. She’s also partially deaf, a fact she didn’t learn for years. And she’s queer. When Millington started playing in bands in the mid-1960s, none of those characteristics pointed to a rock career.
Yet she and her sister Jean navigated through endless gender and racial stereotypes with their bands, forever forced into demonstrating that their "chick band" wasn’t a novelty. Millington traces her origins in a new self-published memoir, Land of a Thousand Bridges: Island Girl in a Rock & Roll World. It’s a conversational, occasionally discursive chronicle that conveys wide-eyed wonder at the power of music. She writes about seeing Hendrix play, jamming with her friend Lowell George of Little Feat, and trading tips with Bonnie Raitt, along with the adventures of the the Svelts and Wild Honey, bands she played in on her way to Fanny.
Millington quit Fanny in 1973, done in by band infighting and the external pressure of representing women in the male-dominated rock world. She continued in music, on her own and with other collaborators (including her sister), and has been an outspoken supporter of female musicians and the LGBT movement. In the mid-'80s, she co-founded the Institute for the Musical Arts, a non-profit group supporting women in music, which is now located in western Massachusetts.
There, in front of an enormous fireplace in the living room of the 19th-century farmhouse she shares with her partner of 30 years, Millington talked about her memoir and the belated groundswell of recognition for Fanny, a band David Bowie once said was "as important as anybody else who’s ever been, ever."
"There's really nothing like taking over a room because you're good, not because you got mad."
Pitchfork: Through everything that you cover in the book, there's this irrepressible optimism that comes through. What do you think has kept you so optimistic?
June Millington: Music saved my life. I mean, music is life. It is everything to me. It's why I'm talking to you right now. It's why I can meet people—I was so shy as a kid, and when I started to write songs and perform them with my sister in front of the public, people started to talk to me, and that made me feel really good. Everything about it has always been positive.
Pitchfork: What kind of learning curve did you face at the start?
JM: We had to be our own mothers of invention, in many senses of the word. So the secret, really, to our musical experience as to why we survived and got as far we did is that by the time the Svelts got to L.A., we knew all of the essentials. We knew how to play, we knew how to book a gig, set up a PA, pull a trailer, talk to audiences after, get somehow enough sleep and still get good grades. Let's don't forget that part. We got good grades. And we never got too off-track—somehow.
Pitchfork: Given all of that, did your blood boil when people were condescending because you're women?
JM: We learned how to take it and that was a good thing, because if we spent our time being angry, we wouldn't have been able to get good grades or learn songs that week. We didn't get mad, we just learned how to play better and turned up louder. I mean, there's really nothing like taking over a room because you're good, not because you got mad.
Pitchfork: In the late '60s, you were a bystander to the sex and drugs and just obsessed with the rock.
JM: I think the fact that I was probably born deaf in one ear, and without the equilibrium on that side caused me to not hear a lot of what people were saying to me, and I sort of instinctively knew that, so I was kind of in my own little world. The other part of it is that I'm mixed blood and mixed culture. So I watched a lot. I think that that became a habit, and then it became a defense when I understood this weird thing—racism—was happening. I didn't know the word "racism," but it didn't feel good, I knew that. So then I pulled away a little bit further, and then the sexism. Jeez, by the time we got to sexism and the Svelts, you know, "not bad for chicks," I barely noticed that. Not bad for chicks? Are you kidding? It didn't really mean that much to me, and the fact that we knew that just by saying "not bad for chicks" we had won them over. That was the mantra. In that moment, we knew we'd won them over.
Pitchfork: What gave you the confidence to just brush that off?
JM: Realizing that we could make people happy, that we had the control to do that. Happiness is just a great equalizer. It's like water. You pour happiness liberally and all sorts of great things are going to happen, you know? So once we realized that, it was like pretty much home plate. Why bother with anything else when you can go directly to that joy? If you can give people happiness, you're in their hearts. Now you can just start having conversations with people that you would not have had under other circumstances.
Pitchfork: Fanny is starting to get its due, but what do you think took so long?
JM: I think there are just two reasons. One is that Warner Bros., when they had a failure—what they perceived as a failure—they just didn't see any point in publicizing the fact that they had had Fanny. Our successful producer, Richard Perry, never mentions Fanny, but look at the hits he's had. I mean he was recording "You're So Vain" at the same time we were doing "Hey Bulldog" and "You're So Vain" just got the juice, unfortunately for us. But the other thing is the newcomers on the block, they don't really want to give attention to who came before. They want their time in the sun. I can kind of understand it. I did resent it for a long time, like, "Why didn’t you even mention us?" We were so tired by that point, but we consciously stayed together an extra year, because we had meetings where we talked about how it important that we do this for other women who are coming along.
Pitchfork: What is it that has brought Fanny back into people's minds?
JM: The music itself. I have this theory that people are actually really hungry for sonic space and understanding words, and I think that people are ready to look back and actually appreciate some of what came before. And then you really do have the entire movement that I'm just going to call feminist, because I am a feminist. I think the education of young girls and women about what came before has started and I think that the knowledge of Fanny is part of that.